Disney's 'Beauty and the Beast'

Disney has been a pioneer in the current 3-D wave, but to date it has converted only one of its library titles to stereo, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Now the Mouse is breaking new ground by converting the 2-D animated library title Beauty and the Beast.

Producer Don Hahn, who's overseeing the conversion for the studio, says, "We developed some proprietary software to actually inflate the characters and actually create dimension out of them, to really see the width and breadth of Belle's face, or the Beast's body."

Part of the challenge was to keep Beauty's distinct look, he says.

"CG films are fine, but the magic of a film like Beauty and the Beast is it's hand-drawn, it's hand-crafted. So even the backgrounds, even though they're painted with brush and paint, we want a sense of depth so the buildings, the trees and the distant landscape all kind of extrude away from you in space. That was part of the goal."

By David S. Cohen, Variety